March 20, 2013 THE VILLADOM TIMES I • Page 19 Taft, future U.S. president and Supreme Court justice, and Taro Katsura, Japan’s foreign minister, inked a deal in which the United States got a free hand in the Philippines from Japan, and Japan got a free hand in Korea from the United States. The year was 1905. The Japanese were already mopping up Tsarist Russia in independent Korea and Chinese Manchuria. Hirobumi Ito shortly kicked in the door of the Korean palace and told the king he was signing a deal for a protectorate. The king declined to sign, but in the end enough people signed at gunpoint to make the protectorate legal -- to the Japanese and the Americans if not the Koreans. In 1908 -- the same year the Root-Takahira Agreement between the United States and Japan gave Japan economic rights to develop Manchuria, which still belonged to China, Korean patriots killed Durham White Stevens, first America’s guy in Japan and then Japan’s guy in Korea, at the San Francisco Ferry Building, where he was advocating Japanese control of Korea. In 1909, a lone Korean patriot killed Ito at a railroad station in Manchuria. This was a mistaken murder. Ito had perhaps sincerely advocated a policy of big brother/little brother between the Japanese and Koreans and, like the Koreans, Ito saw Russa as the real enemy, and the United States and Britain as dubious friends. The Korean who killed him attributed Ito’s policies, which he personally admired, not to Ito, but to the drunken Japanese Emperor Meiji -- whom the assassin revered as an enemy of “the white peril.” Ito was shortly replaced by General Masatake Terauchi, who pounded the Korean resistance movement into the ground. In 1918, after the Japanese helped defeat Germany in World War I as a British/U.S./French ally, Terauchi cut a deal with the Americans, British, and French to fight the Bolsheviks for Siberia. The Japanese supplied most of the troops. The Koreans, who had not heard about the Taft-Katsura Agreement, took Woodrow Wilson’s “self-determination for all nations” seriously enough to stage a huge national protest against the Japanese occupation -- up until then, limited to destroying a rebel Korean army but also to building railroads, hospitals, and schools for the Koreans and the Japanese settlers. A few Korean thugs on the fringes murdered a couple of Japanese settlers or Korean sympathizers and the Japanese Army and Korean National Police (about half Japanese and half Korean) went on a rampage. Japanese-Korean amity was dead on arrival after the Sumil Protest of March 1919, but the Japanese were not leaving Korea. Under communism, Russia was a bigger threat than it had been under the Tsar, but just to Japan -- and the Korean Peninsula pointed like a dagger at the belly of Japan. The economic advantages of the Korean occupation by Japan were a wash. Even Korean sources admit the Japanese put more money into Korea than they took out, and some of the schools and public buildings the Japanese put up there are still standing. After Pearl Harbor, Japan became the bad guy. At the Cairo Conference, FDR, Winston Churchill, and Chiang Kai-shek, who had many Korean patriots in his army, signed a press release guaranteeing the independence of Korea after Japan was defeated. The Korean patriots rejoiced. Then FDR and Churchill flew to Teheran to confer with Stalin and that was the last time anybody heard about Korean independence. Advised by Alger Hiss and Owen Lattimore, FDR forgot Korea had ever existed. FDR at Yalta talked Stalin into a boots-on-the-ground invasion of Japanese-held Manchuria and Japaneseowned Korea, which the United States had given Japan as door prizes in 1905 and in 1908. Now Manchuria and Korea were Stalin’s prizes for fighting against Japan. At the last minute, Truman -- actually suspicious of Stalin -- had Dean Rusk draw a line across Korea at the 38th Parallel and North Korea was officially defined. Kim Il Sung became the first president of communist North Korea. Kim told people he was the grandson of a Presbyterian minister, born in a log cabin on the slopes of a sacred Korean mountain, and a great hero of the successful war against Japan. Informed sources say he got his job because he was a major in the Soviet Red Army. Neither Han China nor Mongol China nor Manchu China nor Republican China nor Japan had ever thought there was more than one Korea. Now, thanks to FDR and his pro-Soviet advisors Hiss and Lattimore, there were two. One became prosperous. The other became a death zone of its own citizens. Next time would-be patriots urge bombing North Korea, remember how North Korea came to exist. Remember also that every woman, child, or unarmed man killed by a bomb is a murder victim. Would Korea have been better off as a sovereign nation? I believe so. The Koreans are an intelligent people with a staggering work ethnic and, before the Yi Dynasty became decadent two centuries ago, they had an impressive culture with many inventions, including the world’s best phonetic alphabet, the nautical compass, the astrolabe, and central floor heating. Would Korea have been temporarily better off as part of the Japanese Empire? I may make some enemies on this one, but there are two million ethnic Koreans now living in Japan. They have a higher per capita percentage of millionaires than the ethnic Japanese, many of them are professionals, and few have any desire to live in North Korea. FDR should have kept his word at Cairo. Korea should have been free, and Korea should have remained intact. Next time you eat in an Asian resident, remember General Grant. He tended to light a cigar when somebody offered him Asian food, but he told the truth about the way the West had treated Asian people. We may yet pay for it. If you follow the Web, you will see that North Korea threatened to bomb us. Just who in North Korea made that threat is not exactly clear. The photo shows Kim Jong Un with his signature bad haircut, but his name is not mentioned in the story, which attributes the nuclear threat to “an unidentified spokesman.” That certainly messes up the chance for a drone strike, but that was the gentlest of options people mentioned when they heard about the North Korean nuclear threat. Before we go to war over more “weapons of mass destruction,” let us roll back the years and see just how North Korea came to exist. In 1902, a fading Great Britain, eager to keep Russia out of India and protect the lucrative markets in Shanghai, Hong Kong, and other parts of China, inked a treaty with Japan. The Japanese killer elite, once drunken poets and painters and vegetarians, had spent the last 50 years acting rough and talking tough because the Japanese expected to be colonized by the West. Drive-by shootings by fleets of British, French, and Dutch ships -- and by the U.S.S. Wyoming, an American ship -- had rebuked any local Japanese clan feudists who advocated “expelling the barbarians.” Ulysses S. Grant, one of the last U.S. presidents to be spared the influence of Charles Darwin, observed that the European treatment of both the Chinese and the Japanese was scandalous and that one day we would have to pay for it. “I have never been so struck with the heartlessness of nations as well as individuals since coming to the East, but the day of retribution is sure to come,” Grant said. Like most Americans before Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose grandfather made his money in the Chinese opium trade, Grant tended to favor Japan over China. While Grant was touring Asia, he negotiated a treaty between Li Huang-Chang, strong man of Imperial China, and Takamori Saigo, strong man of Japan. Japan achieved peaceful control of the Ryukyu or Loo-Choo Islands that now include Okinawa. Neither side wanted to fight, and Grant’s influence was benign. Teddy Roosevelt was the next player. TR’s assassinated predecessor, William McKinley, had decided not to give the Philippines back to the Filipinos after they helped win their own freedom in the Spanish-American War. When McKinley was murdered by an anarchist, partly in retribution for the highly publicized war crimes then in progress, TR also decided to keep the Philippines. China and Japan -- who were friends at the time -- had some objections. Dr. Sun Yat Sen, father of Chinese independence, joined with his Japanese buddy and enforcer, the giant samurai Torazo Miyazaki, to suggest that the Americans let the Filipinos control their own country. Dr. Sun and Miyazaki had already sent one shipload of guns to the Filipino freedom fighters when TR made the Japanese a deal they did not refuse: Korea for the Philippines. The Taft-Katsura agreement was so secret that, when a Korean scholar discovered the treaty in U.S. archive in 1924, he also fell off his chair and screamed treason to anyone who would listen. The United Stated has a treaty to protect Korea that dated from 1882 when Willam Howard Just who invented North Korea? Letters to the Editor Dear Editor: We are writing regarding the school budget vote scheduled for Tuesday, April 16. We support the Midland Park school budget and plan to vote “yes.” We plan to vote “yes” because we value public education, we value a school with quality academics and extracurricular activities, and because we value the teachers and administrators of Midland Park. We also want our home to increase in value. We cannot change the economic climate that has impacted our home. However, we can get involved in the community and support the Midland Park Public Schools. Supporting and improving our school system will positively affect the value of all our homes! Did you know that quality of schools is one of the key factors buyers look at when purchasing a home? The National Association of Realtors says that, of all local neighborhood amenities that can influence a buyer’s decision to purchase a home, proximity to good quality schools is one of the most influential. Friend and local Weichert Realtors’ sales associate Christine Odell said she is proud to sell Midland Park homes. “This is such a great community to live in, which makes it easy to sell real estate here. People buy more than a home…they buy into a community.” Online real estate site, Red Hot Atlanta Homes, confirms, “We think schools are always an important consideration when looking for a home. Why? Because the success or failure of schools will, over time, affect whether property values rise or fall.” Urges support for school budget When asked, “What town do you live in?” I want my family to answer with pride. My husband and I firmly believe that community pride begins in our schools. Support the 2013-14 school budget – for our children and for Midland Park community pride. Elaine and Judd Seals Midland Park